"Good lawyers need to have tremendous discipline and a high tolerance for tedium," she says. "When I was studying for the bar or preparing for a trial, I would spend days, sometimes weeks, going over tons of details again and again. Finishing a game is not glamorous, and there are a million things to check. To be able to sit down and do it for 18 hours a day for many days in a row without bitching and moaning was crucial to succeeding at this new career."

For Nancy Koors, her long-latent need for speed was called into action immediately. "I was shocked at how much faster we move at Aurora than I ever did in telecommunications," she says. Chris Barrott took only a week to decide to hire her, and then he informed her that she had just six weeks to build a beta version of her software, so it could debut at the annual funeral directors' convention. She beat the deadline, and drew scores of amazed and bewildered morticians to her demos at the annual shindig.

Since the systems began being sold in May, about 30 have been installed in funeral homes around the country. Many of those homes now buy all of their caskets from Aurora. Meanwhile, the company's biggest competitor still doesn't have a competing product on the market.

Andy Tuck's musical skills had more to do with flexibility than they did with speed. Though the improvisational-jazz-musician-as-business-innovator metaphor is a bit clichéd by now, Tuck says it's as true as ever. "Success in jazz depends on the ability to sit in front of an audience, interpret complex signals simultaneously from other musicians, and then make a snap decision about what to play," he says. "Making a pitch or presenting in front of a client uses the same skills. I love it. It's great fun when there's some big, tough guy in the room at a client's office, and you have to read whether he's pleased with the amazing solo you've just pulled off or whether he's beginning to think that you're just a run-of-the-mill consultant and you need to try it in a different key."

After a brief experiment with chopping off his hair and shaving his beard, Tuck realized that looking like a jazz musician was also a big plus. "Trying to look like everyone else was a total disaster," he says now. "When I walk into a room looking the way I do now, people look at me oddly and say, 'Okay, who's he? He's not one of us. What's his perspective?' Which is great. I'm a consultant. I'm not supposed to be one of them. When I cut off my hair, I had to work much harder to get people to notice me. I don't have to fight for airspace now."

Although many of your skills will be portable, there will be some that you can't take with you. Bob Presman is still nostalgic for his days as a sportscaster, evidenced by the photographs on his office wall of his interview with Michael Jordan after the Bulls won their first NBA championship. If his beloved Chicago White Sox came calling with a play-by-play announcing job, he'd snap it up in a minute. "But I'd continue as a financial consultant in the off-season," he maintains. In the meantime, he's managed to find a way to continue his media career. He now does a nightly stock-market report on television for the local NBC affiliate. He doesn't get paid, but it's great marketing for him and his firm.

So far, Andy Tuck has not been able to bring much music into his new life as a consultant. "If you had told me 15 years ago that in 1999, I'd be doing something professionally that didn't involve music, I would have been horrified," he says. "In fact, I even get a little uncomfortable when someone puts a really good jazz record on. So obviously, I have some ambivalence about it. At this point, I can't even bear to hear myself play, since I'm so out of practice."

Life without jazz, however, isn't as bad as he would have imagined before he changed careers. "Not only have I not ruined my life by doing something more ordinary," he says, "I'm actually much happier."

Ron Lieber (rlieber@fastcompany.com) is a senior writer at Fast Company. But if he weren't, he'd open a bread bakery in Brooklyn.

Sidebar: How to ".com" Yourself

Bill Schaffer knew how to use a keyboard -- in other words, when he went to work for Digital Equipment Corp. In 1984, he could type. That was about the extent of his technical expertise. For years, he'd traveled the globe as a consultant, working with the World Bank and other institutions on management-development projects. As he spent more time in his new career, first at Digital and then at Sun Microsystems Inc., more and more liberal-arts majors turned to him for advice about breaking into the high-technology business. So he wrote "High-Tech Careers for Low-Tech People" (Ten Speed Press, 1999), an extremely thorough, utterly down-to-earth guide.

In an interview with Fast Company, Schaffer offered some advice for people who want to take part in the digital gold rush.